 As we touched upon in the past video, thinking and reasoning may be conceived of as being objective or subjective in nature, where objective thinking means reasoning according to a set of logically objective standards, while subjective thinking refers to reasoning without objective standards and is thus largely contingent on the nature of the individual subject conducting the process. A subject is a person or thing. In this context, subjective means pertaining to the characteristic of an individual person. Likewise, it can mean relating to properties or specific conditions of the individual mind as distinguished from general or universal experience. Subjective thinking is then thinking from a single subject-centered perspective. An example of subjective thinking would be Eurocentrism. Seeing the world from the single subjective perspective of a European person, this perspective can obviously not be generalized to everyone on the planet and thus it is subjective. Subject-centered thinking is centered on the individual and specific to that individual group. It cannot be generalized or made objective because subjective thought is thinking based upon emotion and personal reference rather than rational logic. A subjective statement is one that has been altered by the specific character of the speaker or writer. It often has a basis in reality but strongly reflects the perspective through which the speaker interprets the world. Humans have evolved from creatures whose own survival depended upon being focused on their own interests, often at the expense of others. As is typically the case with animals and other creatures. Biologically, we developed from children that are essentially the center of their own universe with little comprehension for the existence of other entities as in some way separate from themselves. Physiologically, we experienced the world through our individual body, located in a specific time, place, culture and society. Order these place a subjective interpretation on the world as a default position to the human condition, a view of the world that is centered around the individual subject. In this respect, one might think of subjective thinking as first order thinking as we are all born with it and objective thinking as a form of second order thinking in that it is something that must be purposely developed through standards that we place on ourselves and which we try to live up to. There is nothing inherently wrong with subjective thinking. We all experience the world as subjects, but subjective thinking is not based on objective standards. It is dependent on the nature of the individual. It is conditioned and contingent on the character of that individual. Thus, subjective thinking can be positive or negative depending on the nature of the individual. Subjective thinking can be shaped by an altruistic or egoistic perspective. Egoism or selflessness is the principle or practice of concern for the welfare of others. A belief thought or behavior may be described as being altruistic when it is perceived as being motivated by a desire to benefit someone other than oneself for that person's sake. The word was coined by the French philosopher Auguste Comte in France as an antonym for egoism. He derived it from the Italian word which in turn was derived from the Latin word meaning other people or somebody else. Altruism in biological organisms can be defined as an individual performing an act which is at the cost of themselves but benefits either directly or indirectly another third party individual without the expectation of reciprocity or compensation for that action. There has been some debate on whether or not humans are truly capable of psychological altruism. Complete altruism may be seen to be as impossible as complete egoism in that no one individual exists independently from all others and can thus be solely focused on their individual interests without the interests of others. Vice versa, no individual can exist as completely a part of everything else, being able to be interested in only the whole and others without regard for their own individual interests. Altruism is a traditional virtue in many cultures and a core aspect of various religious traditions and secular value systems. Altruism is often a core component of a belief or value systems conception of being what they call good with acts of altruism endorsing the individual as such. Altruism is often strongly associated with religion or spiritual convictions that the world is good and whole. This is corroborated in research by Robert Putnam in his 1990 book Bowling Alone which demonstrated that those who frequented churches or synagogues were more likely to do voluntary work. To give money to charity, donate blood, help the homeless, help a neighbor with homework, spend time with someone who is feeling depressed etc. As measured by church or synagogue attendance is he found a better predictor of altruism than other factors such as education, age, income, gender or race. Psychological altruism is contrasted with psychological egoism which refers to the motivation to increase one's own welfare. The two may often exist in a somewhat reciprocal role of codependency. In the book The Economics of Herbert Spencer the author writes From the dawn of life then, egoism has been dependent upon altruism as altruism has been dependent upon egoism and in the course of evolution the reciprocal services of the two have been increasing. Like all forms of subjective thinking, altruism identifies the world with oneself. Just as with egoism there is no differentiation between the subjective individual and the objective environment. We project our own conceptions onto the environment around us, instead of being receptive to how that environment is independent of ourselves. Egocentrism is the incapacity to differentiate between self and other. More precisely it is the incapacity to untangle subjective schema from objective reality. An inability to understand or assume any perspective other than one's own. Egocentric thinking is a way of thinking that is centered around the subjects individual motives, desires and interests. It is a way of reasoning that places an over emphasis on the value and importance of the subject doing the thinking. Egocentrism results in a tendency to derive information via referencing oneself and how one is being affected by the world. A tendency to view everything in relation to oneself without other things having any real independent objective existence. One's desires, values and beliefs that seem to be self-evidently correct are often uncritically used as the norm and standard for interpreting all judgment and experience. Egocentrism has been identified in psychology as a product of a failure of psychological differentiation during development that would result in the capacity for an objective perspective, seeing things as existing and having value independent from oneself. The term Egocentrism derives from the work of John Piaget, a Swiss clinical psychologist known for his pioneering work in child development. His 1950s theory of cognitive development refers to a lack of differentiation between some aspect of self and other. The classical example is the failure of perspective taking that is characteristic of young children. Unable to infer accurately the perspective of others, the egocentric child ascribes their own perspective to them instead. However, egocentrism is a broader concept that encompasses a number of different features of psychological development. These include realism, where there is a confusion of objective and subjective, animism, which is a confusion between animate and inanimate, and artificialism, a confusion of human activity or intentions with natural causes. But what these forms of egoism have in common is the inability to differentiate subjective and objective perspectives. Egoism projects subjective qualities onto external objects or events, and they are unable to de-center from their own perspective, or else assimilate objective reality to their subjective schema, the result being a deformation of reality in some way. In his work, Piaget suggested that egoism was a primary characteristic of children's thought processes until about 6 or 7 years of age, or when they're able to form objective mental models during attempts to solve problems. However, when egoism continues past this level, and the child fails to differentiate between self and other, this becomes an issue. There is nothing wrong with people following their own objectives, interests and desires. The problem arises when that is done without regard for others, which is often the case when an objective perspective is not developed in order to give balance value to others. Non-reflexive thinking, focused on the individual, also extends to the group, creating what we call ethnocentrism, which are tendencies to regard one's own social context or culture as central, based on a belief that one's own cultural group is superior to others. Ethnocentrism is a form of egocentrism extended from the self to the group that the individual identifies with. Much non-reflexive thinking is either egocentric or ethnocentric in its nature. Egoism, like all exclusivist subjective philosophies, is prone to constant self-contradiction because it supports all individual's self-interest, irrespective of any logic. Because individuals develop within different contexts, and thus form different subjective perspectives, the result can be overall disunity. Subjective thinking, whether over-ulturistic or over-egoistic, derives from a failure of the individual to differentiate themselves from the objective world. The result is a naive perception that the world is simply transparent to their conception of it. Subjective thinking is naive in nature in that it lacks the capacity to analyze information according to some set of objective standards that might determine its value or validity. Indeed, subjective thinking, in its different forms, leads to a projection of one's own way of being onto the rest of the world, whether the individual's way of being is seen as positive or negative. With egoism, this often means naive cynicism. Nive cynicism is a philosophy of mind, cognitive bias, and form of psychological egoism that occurs when people naively expect more egocentric bias in others than actually is the case. Likewise, an individual with an ulteristic perspective will tend to project their own will onto the world, in trust and faith that others and the world are in some way good, which is the opposite from naive cynicism. Equally, subjective thinking naively leads to the conclusion that one naturally sees the world in some objective way and that there is only really one perspective on the world. As Priyaj noted, an egocentric child assumes that other people see, hear and feel exactly the same as the child does. In a social context, subjective thinking leads to people believing what they believe, not because of evidence and reasoning, but simply because they have been raised to believe that. This naive perspective is maintained by a lack of exposure to other ways of thinking, by staying within a single cultural society that maintains a single dominant belief or value system, the result being that they believe their culture perspective is the only correct interpretation of reality, without subjecting it to reason. The idea that people naively believe that they see things objectively and others do not has been acknowledged for quite some time in the field of social psychology. For example, while studying social cognition, Solomon Ashk and Gustav Ickeheiser wrote in 1949, we tend to resolve our perplexity arising out of the experience that other people see the world differently than we see it ourselves, by declaring that those others, in consequence of some basic intellectual and moral defects, are unable to see things as they really are and to react to them in a normal way. We thus imply, of course, that things are in fact as we see them and that our ways are the normal ways. Subjective thinking often uses objective reasoning as a means to justify its own ends to others as being in some way objectively derived. We are motivated to believe, especially those things that we want to believe. The default mode of human psychology is to arrive at beliefs for largely emotional reasons and then employ our reason more to justify those beliefs than to modify or arrive at those beliefs through reason in the first place. Subjective thinking often results in the process of starting with the conclusion and then figuring out which arguments can be marshaled in order to defend that conclusion. On the other hand, objective reasoning focuses on the process going forward where the conclusion follows from the logic and not the other way round. This rationalization process is symptomatic of the desire within subjective thinking to make reality fit the subject's desired conception of it rather than the subject altering their conception in accordance with some objective logic. Subjective thinking is dependent upon a single perspective or conclusion. The thinker will more often alter reality to make it fit their thinking and will be unlikely to abandon their own thinking in the face of a reality that refutes it until completely necessary. In the next section we'll look at objective reasoning which is a central part of critical thinking.